New book by Adrian Beck, Head of Department, is now available from Palgrave Macmillan

In this challenging new book, drawn from extensive research, Adrian Beck and Colin Peacock provide new insights highlighting how organisations have and can reduce shrinkage. This text offers one of the most comprehensive accounts of retail loss prevention to date and critically assesses current thinking on how the problem should be both conceived and addressed. Designed for students, academics and practitioners alike, it provides fresh thinking on a problem that has plagued the retail industry since its inception.

Understanding shrinkage

It is estimated that shrinkage – the euphemistic term used by the industry to cover financial losses that retailers face through spoilage, damage, error and theft – costs the global retail industry approximately $232 billion a year, equivalent to more than 50 per cent of bottom line profits for many retail organisations. Yet understanding why this persists in being such a resilient and costly problem has proved an elusive challenge, with the industry continuing to spend in excess of $46 billion every year trying to address it.

Different perspective on managing the problem of retail loss

Through adopting a systemic and systematic approach, premised upon a detailed understanding of the role failures in organisational processes can play in generating the opportunities for shrinkage to occur, the authors present a radically different perspective on managing the problem of retail loss. They question many commonly held preconceptions, in particular, that the problem is primarily due to external theft, and suggest that organisations need recognise more fully their role in creating operational frameworks that generate a myriad of opportunities for losses to occur.

New Loss Prevention: Redefining Shrinkage Management offers the reader:

• a comprehensive review of what is known to date about the scale and extent of shrinkage in the retail sector
• a critical analysis of the traditional ways in which shrinkage has been managed
• reflections on the broader retail context and how this impacts upon the management of shrinkage
• a detailed review of how ‘shrinkage’ is defined and measured
• new insights into the key role operational failures and opportunity play in creating shrinkage
• effective ways to break the ‘shrinkage life cycle’ and maintain low levels of loss
• a comprehensive model for tackling shrinkage – the ‘Loss Prevention Pyramid’
• a detailed explanation of how to use the ‘Shrinkage Road Map’ – a management tool designed to identify organisational weaknesses and develop appropriate solutions

Full list of Adrian Beck's publications

Purchase New Loss Prevention: Redefining Shrinkage Management from Palgrave Macmillan